


We Don't Believe What's On TV

by mockingjaywands



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-28 16:59:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6337558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockingjaywands/pseuds/mockingjaywands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A late night conversation leads to a revelation Tyler had never expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Don't Believe What's On TV

It was four in the morning, and Josh and I were watching some cheesy movie where the guy got the girl and everything worked out. The perfectness of the scenario would normally grate on me, but tonight I didn’t mind. Josh was laying next to me under a blanket, his leg resting over the top of mine, and all I could feel was the warmth where our legs touched. He was curled into my side, and I didn’t know when that had happened. I think it was gradual; neither of us had realized it was happening until it had. I started playing with Josh’s hair because the red strands captured my attention more than the movie. They looked like fire in the dim light. They reminded me of a steady candle, warm and constant. Maybe his hair was magic. It represented comfort to me; I wondered what it would represent to other people. As the couple on the screen leaned into a kiss, Josh looked up at me, and his eyes were so full of the secrets of the world; the very universe, that it made my heart stop. For a second, it looked like he was going to say something, finally let loose all the unimaginable wonders that must run through his tightly sealed mind, but he turned away from me. My hand slipped from his hair in a muted sense of disappointment. Ever since I first saw him, I had noticed the edge under the happiness in his brown eyes. And I wanted desperately to know what that edge spoke of; what stories it would tell; the tones it would take. Razor sharp in a dangerously velvet way; fragile like a pile of broken glass.  
“Josh,” I said. He immediately looked up at me again. “I just want to know what’s on your mind.”   
He looked up at the ceiling as some piano music played through the TV.   
“It’s just that everything seems so fake sometimes, you know?” I squinted at him, wondering if he was close to letting that edge spill out. Because in that moment, he didn’t sound in control at all.  
“Why do you say that? Why now?” I whispered. “How long have you thought that?”   
Josh sat up, running a hand through his hair. It may have been a trick of the flickering light from the TV, but I could’ve sworn his hands were shaking.   
“Ever since I started paying attention to the stuff they talk about on TV, the shows, the news, everything. It’s like society is a pair of sunglasses in a room full of corpses. You put the glasses on to hide the dead bodies, but you can’t see anything and you can still smell them. Society blinds you, but it doesn’t help you. It makes it worse.” I wondered what “it” was.   
“That’s why I don’t believe what’s on TV,” he continued. “I can’t believe what’s on TV. Everyone wants to be perfect, to have a perfect life, and that’s what we see when we turn on these vessels of lies. It’s all stuff that’s been manufactured so as not to startle the average people who have never seen hardship one time in their whole lives.”  
He broke off, and there was a pause in which I let him think. I could practically hear this thoughts. I could see in his eyes how loud they must be.  
“TV shows us what we want, and what we want we can’t believe. It shows us the celebrities with their mansions and money, and the average people want that. But we’ll never have that.  
“It shows us perfect relationships, when in reality, it’s just actors. No relationship is perfect. Maybe there’s fights, and absences, and secret battles and pain, but there’s no such thing as perfection.”  
“Maybe you can create perfection?” I suggested hesitantly. I had no idea what to say to him, and that made me feel like a child, using words like building blocks, creating clumsy structures that fell before they could even be built.  
“But no one would think it’s perfection, because it couldn’t be after you’ve made drawbacks and tradeoffs to achieve that perfection, could it? Then it wouldn’t be perfection at all. And that’s why we can’t believe what’s on TV. It’s dangerous.”  
“Josh, you’re scaring me. I want you to be okay. I wanna help you. I’ve never seen you like this….” I trailed off, wondering if I’ve been a bad friend.   
“I’m usually not like this.” He paused, looking vulnerable as the light from the TV played over half his face. The words were saturated with a centuries-old weariness. “It’s just that….I wanna know that if I fail, you’ll still be here.” He looked down. “I’m so terrified that you’ll leave me.”  
“I’d never leave you.”   
“Promise?”  
“Promise. Will you ever leave me?”  
“Never.”  
“Good, because I’m willing to keep you around no matter what. Even if takes me singing to you until my voice turns raw and ruins the lyrics.” I said. My tone was joking but the words were dead serious, and I meant every syllable. I hope he knew that.  
“Your voice always sounds pretty,” Josh said.   
“And you always look pretty,” I whispered, barely moving my lips. I didn’t know if I wanted him to hear the words or not.  
“What?”  
“Nothing. Josh, let’s go to bed.”  
“Okay.” He got up and turned off the TV, and I shivered in his absence of warmth. He crawled back under the blanket, pulling another one over us, and I slowly fell asleep, the knots of worry in my brain dissolving in the steady warmth of Josh’s presence. If I can feel him, that must mean he’s okay, was my last thought.

The next morning, Josh wouldn’t look at me. I made him pancakes with his favorite recipe but I don’t think he even noticed. It made my heart break a little. He always noticed. Out of nowhere, he scraped his chair back, and I winced at the way the sound shattered the uneasy silence.  
“Josh, ar-are you okay?” My voice broke. “Did I do something wrong?”  
His face was like a mask, and again, I found myself wishing I could know what was on his mind.   
“What if my dream doesn’t happen?” He asked, and the raw pain in his eyes left me breathless. I had no idea that such a seemingly happy person could hold that much pain. I knew that he remembered every stolen second of reality from last night.  
“What do you mean?” I asked.  
“What if it doesn’t happen? What if we don’t get off the ground and our dream fails? I’ve fought so hard to hold on to this dream, and I don’t know how I’d live with its failure ripping me apart. I don’t know how I could live knowing that I’d have to change what I tell my friends. I don’t know how I could live at all, Tyler, I-I’ve just tried so hard to hold on to this dream because I want it more than anything, but we’ve all learned to kill our dreams-”  
“Josh, you won’t lose your dream. I promise. Because it’s my dream, too and I’m not letting it go without a fight.”  
“It’s just that I-I don’t want to know who I’d be if I wake up from this dream; if it doesn’t work out. Because if I wake up, that means I’ve been sleeping and this won’t have worked out and-”  
“You told me that we’ve learned to kill our dreams. But we haven’t. It’s our dreams that keep us alive.  
“Did you know that when I first met you, the first thing I noticed was your hair? It was so bright and pretty that the mind underneath it must be, too. But Josh, I don’t care what makes your hair so bright. I just wanna know what’s on your mind. These thoughts you must’ve been keeping for so long and never spoke of, it just kills me. Like they must’ve been killing you. You can tell me anything, Josh, please, and I’ll be here for you even if you do fail.”  
“When I was younger, I used to want to die. I couldn’t imagine a life past my teens. I didn’t know how I’d ever make it there. But then I met you, and I thought twice.” He started crying. “You made me think twice.”   
“Thank you,” I whispered.  
“For what?”  
“For letting me be the one to make you think twice.”   
He closed the distance between us, and his face was so open I felt like I should look away. But I didn’t. I gazed at everything he’d been hiding from me, and I broke down in an achingly sweet way.   
“Josh, you’re not perfect. You’re not like those actors on TV. We are not perfect. But we’re real, and and goddamn it, I think we can create our own perfection.”  
Josh took my hand, and in that tiny gesture, I felt a new frail strength forming. I squeezed his hand, and then dropped it, instead reaching up to trace his cheekbones, fingers slipping on his tear tracks. I leaned in close, pausing with our lips an inch apart. I closed my eyes and felt his breath fan across my lips.   
“I love you,” I said, and then closed the bittersweet distance. The kiss wasn’t like the ones on TV at all. It was perfect in the way iodine burns to heal a cut; a wavering paradox that healed our thoughts and broke down the crumbling, aching walls. It wasn’t perfect by anyone’s fake standards, but it was perfect to me.

**Author's Note:**

> so that was my fic based off wdbwot and i hope you liked it!


End file.
